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Interview: Kevin Harvick

June 13, 2012

Kevin Harvick rounds the track at Pocono last week. Harvick took some time to talk with AutoWeek's Brant James. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPIC

Kevin Harvick on Tuesday completed a briskly paced afternoon during a NASCAR Coke Zero 400 media junket in Tampa Bay, Fla. He visited with troops at MacDill Air Force Base, toured Tropicana Field and after a dinner of hot dogs and ice cream—he had an 8 a.m. workout scheduled for the next morning, so it was a wash—he unleashed a 37-mph ceremonial first pitch before the Tampa Bay Rays-New York Mets game. He lasted only about an inning at the game before he was due to return to the Charlotte area and continue a busy week wedged into a busy summer that will include the birth of his first child, a boy, in July.

As Harvick made himself comfortable at the baseball game in a pseudoleather front-row seat in the club level, we carved out 11 quality minutes with the Sprint Cup veteran.

Autoweek: I'm told that first pitch was 2 mph faster than your effort at Yankee Stadium last year. The locals might have been a little nervous with you throwing to Evan Longoria though. He's been out about six weeks with a hamstring.

Kevin Harvick: They didn't want to see him jump up at that high pitch, did they?

AW: Did you ever get a satisfying explanation, or at least any explanation, from NASCAR about the timing-line penalties at Pocono?

KH: I didn't. Obviously, I looked at the pit-road speeds coming back and all of our cars and sections were eight-tenths of a mile an hour faster in that particular section. So for me, I ran my regular speed to my box that I would do every week. It's not our first time figuring pit-road speeds out. It's not very hard for the engineers. I would run my regular, like I would every week to the box and out of the box and slow down the last section a substantial amount.

AW: So you're saying you got it right?

KH: I don't have any doubt in my mind. Maybe we were right; maybe we were wrong. It doesn't really matter. There's something going on with that many people to miss it. If it was just us, I wouldn't argue about it.

AW: Would NASCAR tell you if it realized it made a mistake?

KH: Oh, absolutely not.

AW: How's the fatherhood thing coming?

KH: Five weeks. Due date is July 23rd. The plan right now is to induce [labor] the 17th, the week before. Since the baby will be full-term, the doctor was comfortable with that. That'll be, hopefully, the Tuesday after Loudon.

AW: What do you think is the story of the year in Sprint Cup so far this season?

KH: That's a hard question for me to answer, just because we've been in kind of our own little world, I guess you could say. We've been really focused on what we've been doing as a team. We've had a lot to build with the whole new team coming in this year. You know, we made some mistakes at the beginning of the year. We've run fine. We just need to get a couple breaks to have some momentum going in the right direction. It's been a year of a lot of different winners, and it seems to be very competitive.

AW: How have the wildcard spots in the Chase for the Championship changed your mentality for one race? For a month, a season?

KH: It depends on where you're at in the points. You want to win to give yourself as much of a cushion as you can and the bonus points. Obviously the wild card is very interesting right now with [Jeff] Gordon. He could win any week just because he's kind of like we are. He's been a little bit better than us but he's got zero breaks so far. He got every bad break you can find. If he wins a race and then you got Kyle [Busch] and Joey [Logano] and . . . who else is back there? There's four or five of them back there. It's going to be interesting.

AW: What's the untold story of the season so far?

KH: I think the resurfacing stuff. I think it went pretty well at Pocono, actually. It was one of the more exciting races this year with all the restarts and pit-road penalties. It was entertaining, it seemed like. That Kansas race, that repave in the middle of the Chase could be interesting.

AW: Will Kevin Harvick Inc. ever come back as a multiseries NASCAR entity?

KH: I have enjoyed being a part of the everyday [Richard Childress Racing] things that happen and being able to spend more time with my team and engineers, and really doing the things we need to do to be able keep our stuff getting better every week. I've enjoyed that part of it, and I feel like that is an important part to keep the performance where it needs to be, whether it is in Cup, truck, Nationwide, over there.

[My wife] Delana and I have really enjoyed not having the hassle of [our own] team. You don't have that constant worry about sponsorship and grind. I would never say “no” that it will never come back, but it would definitely have to have somebody else with the financial backing, and we would be more in a role of running it to do it again. Something like [Ray Evernham did] would be something, that after I'm done driving, we would definitely look at, but doing it all on our own again is not in the cards.

AW: Do you still have the building?

KH: Yeah, it's got a basketball court in it. All my old cars are in it. It's more of a storage area than anything else.

AW: You've won the Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400, all-star race, two Nationwide titles, but what would round out your career?

KH: I think the two things that stick out the most are, obviously, the [Cup] championship to go with the other championships we've been fortunate to win, and I think winning the Southern 500, those are the top two things on the bucket list.